OFA: Fake-tweet accusations baseless

2/26/13 8:10 PM EST

The Obama group Organizing for Action is fighting back against accusations that it generated fake tweets supporting the president's call for gun control legislation.

After OFA urged supporters to tweet members of Congress with the hashtag #WeDemandAVote, Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) and some conservative bloggers complained that some of the resulting tweets appeared to be fake and accused OFA of generating them.

But OFA says they were simply from people new to Twitter or not very active on the site.

"With tens of thousands of supporters engaging via social media during our day of action last week we are thrilled with the number of whom took to new mediums to get involved," OFA spokeswoman Katie Hogan told POLITICO. "Just because a supporter does not spend all their time on Twitter does not mean they are not a real person with real concerns about the direction many members of Congress are trying to take this country."

Stockman's office said Monday that it had received 16 tweets with identical wording and concluded that 10 of them were "fake, computer-generated spambots" because they used the default egg avatar, had hardly tweeted or followed anyone and "engaged in no human interaction" on Twitter. His office also noted that some of the accounts were created within 48 hours of the tweets and "They follow mostly MSNBC anchors or media outlets, not actual people."

OFA gave supporters suggested language for their tweets, which could explain the identical wording, and if a supporter had signed up for Twitter for the first time just to participate, they would have been assigned the egg avatar automatically, and they would not immediately have any followers or interactions. The same could be true for sporadic users.